While holidays are a time of relaxing and rewinding for most people, the competition to capture their attention through emails is quite cutthroat. Brands and small businesses invest significant resources to craft the most appealing templates for their customers. Some companies also hire experienced email marketing firms to create these templates for them. After all, holiday sales generate over $800 billion in revenue, and no business wants to miss this opportunity to rake in some of those profits. Here are 5-holiday email marketing tips to generate more engagement.
5 Holiday Email Marketing Tips to Get More Clicks
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Start planning early
More often than not, holiday email templates are more elaborate and intricate than your regular promotional emails. The earlier you can submit your drafts to the design team, the more time you will have to deal with hiccups before the main campaign. The planning process involves creating a copy with a high conversion rate. The creative team also gets more time to create attractive visuals for your templates. During this time, you should also actively track the performance of your ongoing email campaigns to craft an effective holiday campaign strategy. Finally, A/B test the emails before launching the campaign. Starting a couple of months before the big holidays should give you enough of a head start to optimize your emails.
Email Monks, now Email Uplers, created a highly interactive email template for their Halloween campaign. The email displays a wonderful castle that turns all spooky when the reader clicks on the CTA button. Extensive planning and starting early made it possible for Email Monks to create this work of art.
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Include trends in your holiday emails
As they say, don’t try to fix something unless it is broken. Similarly, if your last strategy worked well in the past, chances are that it will work well this year too. Of course, you will need to make a few design tweaks to make it ready for the upcoming campaigns. If you are new to email marketing, you can search for past email marketing trends and conduct A/B tests to see what works for your audience. For example, sending an appreciation or thank you for an email during Thanksgiving is an evergreen marketing strategy.
AfterShokz thanks their subscribers for helping them build a wonderful community. Furthermore, they have curated a small list of things their subscribers can do to show their gratitude toward society. Lastly, they wish their readers a happy Thanksgiving. Even though this email is simple, it still works because of the trends and traditions.
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Personalize you emails
Irrespective of the type of email campaign, a bit of personalization will always make your emails stand out. Personalization gives you that slight edge that makes the customer interact more with your emails compared to your competitors. Now, you can either use the most advanced segmentation tactics to include personalized recommendations in your holiday emails. Or, simply refer to your subscribers by their names. Both these strategies will help you gain more clicks and engage your customers.
G2 refers to its subscribers by their name in its holiday email. The email copy is a funny and witty poem about marketers and their everyday tasks. The email design is uncluttered and will surely bring a smile to the reader’s face.
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Build an email campaign schedule
It is a good idea to make an email schedule to make the most of your email campaigns. The schedule should not only include the holiday campaign details, but also the timings of other ongoing campaigns. This is because sending too many retail or promotional emails before your holiday email can fatigue the readers and make them ignore it. Similarly, if you send your festive email too early, it will not have the same impact. On the other, for holidays, like Black Friday, you need to send emails a few days in advance to make your subscribers aware of the upcoming sale.
Kitchenaid’s early Black Friday email campaign achieved three objectives. First, it informed the customers about their upcoming sale. Next, they started their sale early to accommodate more customer purchases and increase their revenue. Lastly, they promoted their membership program that offers extra perks, like free shipping and haul-away, on top of Black Friday discounts.
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Create email campaigns for less competitive holidays
Subscribers’ inboxes are usually filled to the brim with holiday emails during the festive season. It can be difficult to make your emails stand out amongst hundreds of others. But, by targeting lesser-known holidays, you can increase your chances of being noticed. The competition is also significantly less, so you can get a larger portion of the total sales during that period.
Saucey celebrates International Whiskey Day by promoting a classic whiskey bottle. The email contains 5 different whiskey cocktail recipes for their readers to try. The email is very simple, elegant, and to the point.
Conclusion
Holidays are one of the best times to increase your revenue. Follow these tips to boost your email marketing performance during the upcoming holiday season. If you do not have the right resources, you can always outsource the design and creation process to email marketing firms.
